Saying It All, Or Saying Nothing

"So my boss says that in order to improve quarterly earnings we're going to have to blah, blah, blah."

"We're at Thanksgiving dinner and my mother-in-law says if I want to make my sweet potato casserole with marshmallows and pineapple that's nice, but back when she was in charge of Thanksgiving dinner blah, blah, blah."

"Mrs. Carmichael says that my math grades would be better if I'd practice my times tables and blah, blah, blah."

During discussions in her public communications classes at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, N.Y., Cailin Brown's students have blah, blah, blahed to sum up the unimportant details.

And admittedly, the assistant professor of public communications has used it herself.

"Sometimes, I just get tired of hearing myself talk," she says.

It turns out, this isn't just some new way of communicating in our ultra-fast world where text messages and e-mails have created their own abbreviated language (BTW, LOL, U2?), and we're all too busy in the course of the day to be bothered with finishing our sentences.

"Blah, blah, blah" goes back to 1929, according to Jonathan Lighter's Historical Dictionary of American Slang.

There are other uses throughout time. In a 1940 comic strip, Dagwood takes a phone call from a woman and her story is cut short by repeated blahs. The phrase really started gaining verbal ground in the 1970s and 1980s, says Hyde Park, N.Y., lexicographer David Barnhart, perhaps, like, totally caught up in the wave of California Valley speak.

"It's something people trot out because it's sort of like etc., etc., etc. It's a filler for a sentence or a paragraph to move on to the next detail," says Barnhart, editor of the Barnhart Dictionary Companion, a periodical devoted to keeping track of new words that follows up the Thorndike-Barnhart dictionary, co-edited by his father, Clarence.

"These things run as fads, and my guess is 10, 15 years from now, `blah, blah, blah' won't be the way to do it."

Webster's New World College Dictionary lists blah as a uniquely American word that means "boring, predictable, or nonsensical talk or writing" and that when used as "blah blah" or "blah, blah, blah" the phrase serves as a fill-in for that kind of talk.

Years ago, the TV show Seinfeld made "yada, yada, yada" a popular way to skip over mundane parts of a story. But it appears that "blah, blah, blah" may have a little more staying power.

MVP Health Care used it in its recent health insurance campaign, telling people to come to MVP if they're tired of "nonstop chatter from health insurance advertising," or the "blah blahs."

And the characters on the sitcom Will and Grace this season wondered why they were having a conversation at all if they were just going to say, "Blah, blah, blah."

Brown says she thinks people are simply suffering from "information overload," and they can't absorb everything that comes at them.

"Because there are so many messages out there by so many media, the `blah, blah, blah' is a shield," she says.

Although the phrase has made it into the well-spoken world of academia, and Brown has heard her fellow professors use it, Barnhart says he thinks it's generational, used primarily among young people.

And for a man who loves words, "blah, blah, blah" is a verbal assault.

"It's an expression I abhor. I hate it," he says. "Say what you mean or don't talk."